Martyr (January 2024)
By Kaveh Akbar
Borzoi/Alfred A. Knopf, 352 pages.
★★★
Cyrus Shams doesn’t want to die; he just doesn’t wish to live. He thinks about becoming a martyr, but not for ideological reasons. Cyrus just wants his life to have meant something. Suicide is out, as he sees it as an act of greed. Instead he opts for a ascetic lifestyle.
Cyrus has a lot on his plate. He was born into a family that didn’t fancy residing under Iran’s theocratic government, which took power in 1979. Ali and his infant son relocated to the United States, with Roya set to join them later. Alas, her plane was ill-fated Flight 655, which was shot down in 1988 by a missile from the USS Vincennes killing all 290 passengers. It was a complete screwup by the U.S. but President Reagan’s “apology” was muted, given ongoing tensions between the two countries since the storming of the U.S. embassy in Tehran and holding American hostages for 444 days.
A mother’s senseless death could make a child grow up bitter. So too could seeing his father reduced to gumping chickens to support his shattered family. Nor was life in Indiana a comfortable place for a Muslim like Cyrus to come of age. When Ali dies, Cyrus struggles with being an orphan. He drifts through adolescence fixated on purity as a way to deal with his angst. When he enters Keady University in 2015–perhaps a stand-in for Butler, Akbar’s alma mater–Cyrus flips the other way.
Out with purity and in with debauchery! Cyrus takes drugs, distances himself from his remaining Iranian relatives, ignores his faith, and earns money role-playing a patient for medical student training, though it’s often a cruel outlet for his burgeoning cynicism. He also beds several women, including the wealthy Kathleen, who is neither culturally sensitive nor concerned about throwing money around with reckless disregard. It’s a doomed relationship, but she further underwrites drinking bouts that send Cyrus spiraling into alcoholism.
Cyrus broods and dabbles at writing a (sort of) guidebook for martyrs. His Polish-Egyptian roommate Zbigniew Ramadan Novak (“ Zee”) becomes his best friend, occasional lover, and partner in a few strange adventures. One involves performing odd jobs for an employer who watches them from a lawn chair while wearing only his white underwear. Overall, though, Cyrus is depressed, whiny, and irritable. He muses over the poetry of Rumi, has unusual dreams, and wonders how he can free himself from the “tyranny” of symbols. Once he gets sober he fixates anew on what sort of death would justify his life. What he misses is that martyrdom is a purposeful step linked to deeply held ideals, not something that happens through intellectualized passivity. That makes him unlikely to follow in the footsteps of the hunger strikers, suffragettes, and revolutionaries he admires.
When Cyrus finally rouses himself into action it is to travel to the Brooklyn Museum, where renowned visual artist Orkideh has placed herself in an exhibit titled “Death-Speak.” She is terminally ill and spends her final days holding court for museum visitors who wish to gawk at or talk with her. Cyrus is drawn to her for reasons he can’t articulate other than she too is Iranian. He repeatedly visits and leaves each day believing that Orkideh has connected with him on a deep level. Her death leaves him despondent, though discussions with Sang, her gallerist and ex-wife, are revelatory.
Sexuality is fluid in Martyr! and advance copies have reviewed well in LGBTQ+ circles. Nonetheless, though Koveh Akbar is an accomplished poet, Martyr exhibits some first novel misfires. It lacks burnish and has periodic structural breakdowns. Akbar fumbles an opportunity to discuss American voyeurism and focuses overlong on Cyrus’s woe-is-me worldview. To be sure, literature is filled with depressives, but usually they navigate through crises, whereas Cyrus is mostly listless. The book’s most revelatory sections deal with being a Muslim in the Midwest, which readers will likely ponder more than Cyrus does. It’s also hard to ignore a happy ending that comes at us so fast that it feels contrived. It’s not that we wish Cyrus to remain mired in malaise, but his abrupt hopeful conversion, if you will, doesn’t ring true for a character as melancholy as he. Call Akbar’s an interesting first novel with room for growth.
Rob Weir
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